The politics of modern liberty

Thursday March 26, 2009

On reflection, The Free Society’s Brian Monteith offers qualified support for last month’s Convention on Modern Liberty

Should we rejoice that the Convention on Modern Liberty was successfully launched last month? Is it a force for good or could it, like so many well-intentioned initiatives, work against the very goals it proclaims?

These may seem odd questions to ask, but when I first heard and then read about the Convention on Modern Liberty my natural suspicions were raised. It immediately reminded me of the formation of the Anti-Nazi League back in the mid Seventies and I smelled a rat.

Wearing my naturally sceptical Panama hat, the one with the cynical black band around it, my suspicions were first raised by the organisation’s name. Convention on Modern Liberty? Modern? Modern Liberty? Hmmn. The inclusion of the weasel word ‘Modern’ was a bad start. I studied architecture, I’ve seen what the cause of modernism has often achieved not just in Britain, but in Africa and the Soviet satellites, and being modern for it’s own sake is at best an empty Blairite soundbite. Forward into the past I thought – and recoiled.

Mendacious

Liberty is liberty is liberty. It is certainly not a modern concept and if adding the word as an adjective was to attract people then it had the reverse effect on me – and I suspect others. That doesn’t mean I have a distaste for the new or the creative, it’s just that as a PR consultant I’ve seen enough mendacious uses of the English language to question why something as pure and as original as Liberty might need ‘modern’ stuck on the front of it.

Indeed, looking at the discussions in the programme – many of which I thought I would be interested in or able to support – I began to think that I would in fact have been more free and enjoy more liberty back in olden not modern times.

The liberties that I have already lost and am threatened with losing – the ability to meet with friends in a landlord’s private property, commonly known as a pub, drinking his ales whilst smoking my pipe or cigar has been denied to me – and now all sorts of proposals for restrictions to my liberty to consume foods and drink alcohol and read what I like on the internet are gathering pace. The denial or encroachment upon these essential social and personal liberties appears to be a ‘modern’ issue and yet it was given little importance in the is convention on modern liberty.

Bedfellows

Once I looked deeper into the people behind the Convention on Modern Liberty I also found an awful lot of bedfellows that, well, I would kick out of my bed were I to find them in it. I am happy to defend the right of people to say things and express beliefs that I vehemently oppose and I can on occasion find common cause with organisations I would be happy to see fail through lack of popular support, nevertheless, before actually working together with my opponents one has to question their motives just as I would expect them to question mine – and so I began to make a few enquiries before allowing myself to possibly sup with the devil and his many lieutenants.

A big point in the Convention’s favour then became apparent – I was not alone in being curiously sceptical about its purpose. The lefty and very lefty groups that I had indentified as being linked to the nascent campaign were, I was informed by a friend with a direct line to them, just as suspicious as I was and were asking themselves why some Tories had been invited to participate. The participation of a number of eminent Tories, not least a panel chaired by Iain Dale, had set some people jumping.

Respectability

This was good news, for it was in 1978 that I recalled the Conservative Students and the Young Conservatives had been duped into supporting, for a short time, the Anti-Nazi League, not realising that not only was it against the rise of the British National Party but it was profoundly against an open liberal society liberty too. It was, essentially, a Trotskyite front dominated by the Socialist Workers party and a whole host of Tories had been duped, becoming the ANL’s fig leaf of respectability.

The ANL policy of ‘No Platform for Fascists’ (but obviously any platform for revolutionary communists and Trotskyites) was anathema to Conservatives’ support for free speech and also, tactically, the best way to drown feed the fascists – Trotskyite polarisation that both groups wanted. Open discussion and debate was what would drown out with reason the obscenities and contradictions of the fascists’ arguments.

Only after a heated internal debate did the Conservatives decide they should withdraw. Interestingly it was the wet woolly liberals within the Tory ranks who were later to join the SDP that had advocated this ‘let’s all hold hands around the campfire approach’. So again, when I saw that the organisers of Convention on Modern Liberty were from the cosmopolitan chattering classes with what I consider their wet and woolly liberalism, clutching their Observer and Guardian for guidance, you might understand why I took a step back.

Suspicion

I also had another suspicion. Was this new campaign just a regrouping of the left? Demoralised by the failure of Blair’s modernisation and Brown’s micromanagement was the left looking for a cause that it could coalesce around, one that might be difficult for Tories to pay anything but lip service to and then be exposed if, or rather when in government?

The fact that the left seemed so divided itself about the Convention’s merits told me I was being too suspicious by half. Frankly, I don’t care if the Conservative party gets into government and then is hoist by its own petard because it has made lots of noises about defending liberties – be they social or civil. In fact I would hope that the Campaign on Modern Liberty could help form a bulwark against the Tory party’s more atavistic responses to security threats.

If it has been set up to cause a future Cameron government real embarrassment if it tries to go back on its commitments to abolish ID cards and all the paraphernalia that goes with them – then that’s all to the good. It would be an argument for as many libertarian minded conservatives or classical liberals like me to engage with it, ensuring that Cameron might listen and that the cause of liberty would not in the future be captured by the left.

The reports of the proceedings and the reactions to them in the following days suggested there was a lot of well-meaning talk and the opening of a few minds to see others’ positions. That can’t be a bad thing.

Qualified

Should then the philosophical conservatives and libertarians become involved with the Convention on Modern Liberty? On balance I think it has to be a yes – but it’s a qualified yes. I think the organisers have to make common cause with those who have been campaigning to defend smokers’ rights and other social liberties, recognising that the threat to civil liberties and our social liberties are all part of the basic urge of politicians – all politicians – to control our behaviour.

CCTV is not just about looking for criminals that mug or assault people, when it becomes a criminal offence to drink or smoke in public CCTV is used to enforce these laws too. It’s all about the power of the group over the individual.

Surely if one is to be free at all one must be free to eat, drink and smoke for one’s pleasure as well as speak, write and act to express one’s opinions? Are our personal pastimes not the consumption of our liberty?

I believe there as just as many people that are sick fed up of Britain’s Nanny State that has evolved into the new Bully State as are worried about the Surveillance State and the Police State – we all need to pull together and recognise that it’s often the same people that buy into these ideas of control.

I don’t think the defence of social liberties has to be top of the agenda, I just think it has to be on the agenda – and not as AOCB! If the Campaign for Modern Liberty can achieve that balance then it will certainly enjoy my support, and probably the support of many others like me.

Brian Monteith is policy director of The Free Society

Link
Convention on Modern Liberty